A conventional ratchet tool generally has a toothed wheel rotatably received in the shank portion of the tool and a pawl member is engaged with the wheel. The shapes of the teeth of the wheel and the shape of the pawl member are designed to allow the wheel to be rotated in one direction and outputs a torque in the other direction. By this arrangement, the tool may outputs the torque without removing the tool from the object so that the user can reciprocatingly operate the tool to tighten or loose the object such as a bolt or a nut. However, the torque output is decided by the depth of the toothed wheel and the pawl member, that is to say, if the shapes of the tooth and the pawl member engaged with the tooth are not deep enough, the toothed wheel could roll over the pawl member if a larger toque is applied. In order to improve this inherent shortcoming, the size of the ratchet tool has to be increased and this results in a heavy weight and inconvenient for use. Furthermore, the ratchet tool generally exerts the torque transversely to the longitudinal axis of the tool, this could be inconvenient for the users who needs to rotate the bolt or the nut whose location shares a common axis with the tool.
The present invention intends to provide a ratchet tool which has an adjusting member mounted to the shaft of the tool and the effective direction of the tool can be decided by rotating the adjusting member.
The present invention has arisen to mitigate and/or obviate the disadvantage of the conventional ratchet tool.